About Rationally Speaking

Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license.

Monday, February 04, 2013

The Coalition of Inner Nations: Thoughts on Julian Baggini’s The Ego Trick

by Steve NeumannThe assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general.— Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Probably as a result of being absolutely inundated with election-year political ads, news reports, and presidential debates last year, I’ve come to see the inception of the United States of America after the War of American Independence as my own metaphor for Julian Baggini’s framing of our sense of self in his worthwhile book, The Ego Trick.

After surveying traditional notions of the self, and citing our best scientific efforts at understanding what the self actually is, Baggini concludes that it’s the combination of our bodies, memories and our nature as social animals that creates the feeling of a unified self. The “ego trick” is to create a strong sense of unity out of what’s actually a concatenation of disparate capacities and characteristics.

So, think for a moment about the creation of the United States of America. After the Revolution, the American colonies were a collection of fiercely independent and mostly autonomous states, each with its own distinctive character. In 1787, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay set out to convince these states to come together in a federation that would ensure a durable government for posterity. Eventually, this new entity would evolve a shared national identity out of the idiosyncrasies of these separate states; it became a functioning unit in its own right.

The picture of the self Baggini shows us is similar, and he takes a non-reductive physicalist approach rooted in a thoroughly naturalistic understanding of the human animal:

You and I are what our bodies and brains do. There is no pearl sitting at the center of our selves, we are rather bundles of psychosomatic activity, albeit highly organized and remarkably stable ones.

Here, the person is understood simply as a coalition or federation of inner and outer “states” with nothing extra in charge of the coalition. Yet most of us have the strong abiding sense of a singular mental “me,” and each of us functions (most of the time) as a coherent entity, not a coalition. As Baggini puts it elsewhere, “We are no more than, but more than just, matter.” But what is this “more” and how is it generated?

Baggini, a philosopher who is primarily interested in bringing ivory tower ideas into the streets for the lay person, doesn’t offer his own technical thesis of how this “more” is generated, nor does he delve into the details of others’ proposals, such as German philosopher Thomas Metzinger’s self-model theory of subjectivity presented in his books Being No One and The Ego Tunnel. Baggini is more concerned with presenting a survey of numerous thinkers on the subject, such as Galen Strawson and Derek Parfit.

After an overview of the dualistic views of the self — in which mind and body are envisioned as separate substances — he notes how neuroscience has effectively confirmed, through observation and experiment, what naturalistic philosophers have long maintained: there’s likely no immaterial self or soul. Nearly the first half of his book is devoted to providing examples from the scientific literature of the mind-brain connection: a man with multiple-personality disorder; a woman who loses her sense of self because of a brain tumor; a man who lost the ability to record any new memories (à la the 2000 movie Memento); and numerous other accounts of brain disease and traumatic brain injury. He sums all of this up with a quotable, incontrovertible maxim: damage the brain and you damage the self.

For those familiar with, and especially those already convinced by, a naturalistic understanding of human beings, Baggini’s argument that the person is a fragile-yet-robust bundle of psychosomatic functions in constant-yet-coherent flux throughout our lifetimes is accessible, straightforward and uncontroversial. It’s when he draws out the conclusions of this view that things start to get a bit contentious. After all, the feeling of being a unified self is the subjective psychological star around which the planets of our personal projects revolve. It gives them meaning and purpose; it gives them significance as our projects. But if we are merely collections of functions and processes without any central core that corresponds to our feeling of being a unified self, then when we use the pronouns “I” or “me” aren’t we referring to an illusion, a fiction?

Baggini encourages us to reject the idea that the self is illusory. After describing a reinterpretation of the earliest Buddhist formulation of the self as an example of why it isn’t an illusion (drawing on the work of Stephen Batchelor, author of Buddhism Without Beliefs), he takes issue with the self-as-illusion view as advanced by fellow naturalists like Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett. Even though they both use the term “illusion” in the dictionary sense of something that is not as it seems to be, Baggini thinks that this usage is too easily confused with the everyday meaning of illusion as something that’s not real. The self is real, he argues, even if it’s not what it seems to be.

This may sound like mere semantic wordplay, but it marks an important distinction. We don’t exist as souls or immaterial mental essences, even though we might seem to, but the sense of a unified self corresponds to the reality of being a coherent and unique individual, with relatively stable physical and behavioral characteristics. Getting this right matters, since how we understand the sense of self touches upon some of the most important features of our humanity. Very few people will come around to a naturalistic view of human beings if they think it implies that what they’ve always believed was the defining aspect of their existence — being an identifiable, coherent me — isn’t real. They might want to be explained, but not explained away. Baggini shows that being skeptical about the “pearl” needn’t undercut a valid sense of being such a “me,” a sense rooted in the (relative) stability of the physical, psychological, behavioral ensemble that makes each of us a distinct individual.

Another concern raised by a naturalistic view of ourselves is the status of free will. The problem for us here, as in our sense of self, is that it doesn’t feel that our behavior is causally determined, as it is under naturalism; on the contrary, the feeling of being “uncaused causers,” having what philosophers call contra-causal or libertarian free will, is as subjectively robust (at least for many of us) as the appearance that the sun revolves around the Earth.

In Baggini’s case, his view of free will ultimately derives from his analysis of character and is therefore resolutely naturalistic. A common truism has it that Character equals Destiny. But what is character? Is it permanent and unchangeable, once we’ve reached a certain age, or is it endlessly shifting? Baggini claims that one’s character is part fixed, part pliable:

It would be absurd to deny that there is any predictability and stability to character... Nevertheless, there is a lot of evidence that character is not quite as constant as we tend to assume.

The evidence he cites consists largely of experiments showing that context is almost as important as one’s purportedly intrinsic traits in determining how one will act in any given situation. Stanley Milgram’s notorious “obedience experiments” and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment show decisively that otherwise good people can do horrific things, depending on circumstances. However, Baggini also notes that “all the situational approach says is that we must take account of the mitigating circumstances.” So while one’s character is not an unchanging, rock-solid core that can be predictably relied upon no matter what, neither is it a chaotic, mercurial phantom.

Baggini also points out that, even though our basic traits come from a combination of genetics and early life experiences, later environmental and societal circumstances continually provide individuals with opportunities for changing their character throughout their lifetimes. One enters into life with a basic scaffolding of dispositions, as it were, upon which one’s choices help shape its final form.

Following up on this, Baggini has a section entitled “Self-creation” which echoes many of the themes found in the writings of Existentialist thinkers such as Ortega y Gasset and Sartre. Existentialists take self-creation to an extreme, believing that human beings are solely responsible for creating themselves, a notion akin to the idea of an uncaused causer with contra-causal free will. Indeed, a common refrain among them is the idea that the human being, and the human being alone, is condemned to freedom. Paradoxically, we have no choice but to create ourselves. Baggini seems to come close to Sartrean thinking when he asks:

Could one ... say that identity itself is not just given, but is something we in some way create ourselves, by our actions?

But, consistent with his naturalism, he ultimately denies contra-causal free will and complete self-creation as posited by the existentialists, while arguing against fatalism. He closes his section on free will saying:

Whether you reject [contra-causal] free will as an illusion ... or accept a compatibilist view of what freedom really means, the believer in the Ego Trick is not condemned to live life feeling like a passive cog in the machinery of nature.

The naturalistic conception of the self argued for in The Ego Trick shows that the person as agent doesn’t disappear or become superfluous; as agents we make our own active causal contribution to our lives. Our actions do make a difference in the working out of our fate, which is what the fatalist denies.

Baggini also speculates on what the forces that form character might hold for us in the future. He briefly considers various notions of an afterlife, comparing and contrasting Eastern (reincarnation) and Western (resurrection) hypotheses; programs for radical life extension; and transhumanism. Of these, transhumanism is at once the most speculative and the most troubling.

According to a paper written by Nick Bostrom, who heads the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, transhumanism is:

The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.

While many might agree with these goals, a danger lurks in this agenda: the risk that those in power will exploit whatever technologies and methods become available to serve their own ends, not the general good. As Baggini puts it:

The people around at the dawn of these choices are going to have more control about how they pan out than people later down the line ... A certain generation in the future could have disproportionate power over the future of humanity.

Given the long history of abuses of power, I’d say Baggini’s caution is well taken.

All told, Baggini’s book is useful and important. It presents a concise and approachable survey of the best arguments for thoroughly naturalistic conceptions of self and personhood and how to guard against their misinterpretations and misuses. It is a welcome addition to the growing literature for the general reader on naturalism and its implications for human agency.

21 comments:

Victor Stenger (www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/VWeb/Home.html) has a link to his essay in Skeptic on "Free Will and Autonomous Will: A Physicist’s Perspective on How We Are Accountable for Our Actions" that distinguishes between free will and autonomous will. After reading this, it seems he is close to making sense of getting rid of the "free" concept.

I haven't read that paper yet. But I would love it if we could do away with the "free" part of "free will". I think Dan Dennett put forward a strong argument for dropping the "free" part, especially in "Freedom Evolves"; but I don't think his writing (at least in his books) is terribly accessible to non-philosophers.

I am wondering if Baggini makes use of the concept of emergence in his book. I think the framework of emergence is useful for thinking about concepts like self, agency, and free will. You are probably aware I am guessing of the series of posts Massimo devoted to emergence prior to his participation in the 'Moving Naturalism Forward' meeting.

I think naturalistic science makes it pretty clear that our common subjective senses of self and free-will are not what they seem to be. There seemed to be agreement among those at the naturalism meeting that the term 'free-will' was not especially helpful and that some variant of 'volition' would be more useful. There also was agreement that 'contra-causal' free-will is untenable although most but not all took a compatibilist position.

I think the interesting questions relate to how we can obtain an accurate sense of two things:

1: What degree of volition is available to us 2: how can we best gain access to it in order to apply our subjective sense of volition in a useful way

My view is that there is a degree of volition that we can access although I think most of our real-time actions emerge from unconscious processes. I think we can use our volition most effectively in a receptive fashion through reflection and mindfulness so that our real-time actions emerge from a more accurately informed unconscious process.

Our unconscious processes are only presumed to be "unconscious" by the consciously operating processes that can't communicate with them in a manner that we can rationally detect and analyze. We don't have to teach our "unconscious" anything that it hasn't already taught our "conscious" brain to rationally consider. It's this so-called unconscious system that maintains our freedom to choose, even though those choices are limited to what the so-called fates have determined we are left to choose from. Our choice making processes in other words start in our relatively unconscious systems, which to themselves are operating with the intelligence that those systems are fully conscious of using.And this was a very good review of a very good book. Keep it up.

Baggini doesn't really get into the concept of Emergence *per se*, but he does talk about the need to address the reality of thoughts and feelings in other terms because talking about them in terms of atoms and such just doesn't make sense to us.

What I like about Baggini is his commitment to naturalism; he says:

"Whatever the mechanism, we have thoughts and feelings because we have physical brains that work, not because there's something else in our heads doing the mental work instead."

Baron P -

Thanks for the positive reinforcement ;)

It's interesting how some philosophers claim to have solved the 'hard problem' of consciousness while some claim it can never be solved. I'm not really sure where I stand on the issue. I definitely believe consciousness is a wholly natural phenomenon, but I really do wonder whether or not we will be able to explain it in a satisfactory way.

Consciousness is intelligence making use of nature's ubiquitous awareness by amplifying it to suit its needs. Intelligence, in other words, is a causative force of nature; how and why it does its job is the hard problem, not the fact that we must be aware of the process for it to work at all.

In the first part of your reply you seem to suggest the unconscious has a type of consciousness? This seems to me to remove meaning from the term 'consciousness'. I'm not sure what is gained through that approach.

In the second part of your reply you seem to confidently suggest that the unconscious informs the conscious, but that there is no useful role of feedback from consciousness back to the unconscious. I am curious why you are so sure the important relationship only goes one direction? Or am I misinterpreting your reply.

Yes, what we call unconscious is only so because what we call our consciousness can't seem to read it. Try to do so and you'll see what I mean. Try for example to watch the thinking process that you use before you speak - you'll notice that you've come up with a well thought out series of abstractions that you can only edit as you speak, but seldom question how you came up with them almost instantaneously. The same applies when you write; ideas come through you mental "pen" that you didn't realize were fully there until the act of writing them.But what we have come to call our unconscious (aka, emotional) brain system is also the one that is, paradoxically, conscious of our sensory contacts with so-called qualia. Which it shares with our rational brain but analyzes separatelyas part of our choice making function. It's the cooperation that goes on between these sytems that's largely unconscious on the rational level, but not on the emotional level - which again seems paradoxical, since our emotional level is actually much quicker at analyzing probable consequences than is our rational.And note that all animals use brains that are the equivalent of our enotional brains, with few having evolved anything like our rational one. My suspicion is that all have both emotional and rational components, but our extremely complicated linguistic systems make the difference. And we can write and preserve our cultural lessons, while others can't. But I digress, as I haven't fully answered your question as to the relationship going only in one direction. It doesn't, but we're not made conscious on a rational level of the methods by which these systems actually overlap and inform each other on an otherwise "unconscious" plane that we can't "read" in our minds. But ironically we can "write" what we ask our unconscious to produce.There's a lot here that will remain mysterious until we learn how to induce our emotions to tell us more - which may not be entirely possible, since they speak our operative language, but we don't speak theirs.

I am aware of the necessary role the unconscious plays in allowing us to operate fluidly in the world be it through speaking or writing or moving,...etc. I also have experienced the continuum whereby we can learn through practice to access some small part of what would otherwise have been unaccessible (unconscious). Of course there is a limit to that access. Still it is by definition that "what we call unconscious is only so because what we call our consciousness can't seem to read it". Otherwise of what use is the term 'consciousness'?

My experience also tells me that with a judicious use of my limited volition I can create lifestyle patterns that change my unconscious patterns in the direction of improved well-being. An example would be moving from extrinsically 'wanting' to exercise to intrinsically 'wanting' to do so after establishing the habit.

Interesting article as usual, Steve. While I'm generally a naturalism and don't have a problem with the natural science of self per se, I think neglect of certain linguistic subtleties makes the presence of such science in popular culture potentially misleading, i.e., productive of false views; and perhaps even some philosophers are towed into this falsity. The subtlety I have in mind - which I think philosopher Alva Noe touches on in a way with his "out of our heads" ideas - relates to the fact that ordinary language about the self and scientific language about the self are effectively different languages in that they assign different meanings to the same expressions. As a rough example, when I refer to myself, I am not necessarily referring to what a scientist refers to with 'self'. Such differences in meanings between the two languages are due to the different purposes the languages serve. Ordinary language serves the purposes of ordinary life while scientific language serves the purposes of scientific understanding.

The reason that someone might draw false views from listening to scientific talk about the self is that equivocations between the languages are unnoticed. As a rough illustration, a scientific description of the self as (say) a patchwork of brain processes might lead someone to conclude that since the pronoun "I" refers to selves, it must refer patchworks of brain processes; so for instance when I say "I" the expression 'I' denotes my patchwork of brain processes.

This sort of confusion is due to the mistaken though frequent assumption that the world comes pre-parsed into discrete entities that words are simply pinned to. The reality of course is that the world is in itself unparsed and that parsing is part of what words do.

The reason I say that Alva Noe's ideas touch on this topic is that I see his view that consciousness is not merely something in the brain as in a sense a criticism of philosophical and scientific views of consciousness on the basis of a closer and broader look at what we ordinarily mean by 'consciousness', a move that I see as respecting ordinary language as an instrument that suits its purposes as opposed to insubstantial proto-science that should be overwritten by science. Non-scientific talk about self can be viewed similarly.

Generally, I think we should be very careful about concluding that our ordinary talk about the self is false or illusory on the basis of science, as we're not necessarily talking about the same things in both cases. I think there's a good possibility, to illustrate, that when a scientist says that the self is illusory, or not what it seems, this really amounts only to saying that science and ordinary language define 'self' differently and the scientific definition is the "real" definition. This idea results from a simplistic view of language.

"This sort of confusion is due to the mistaken though frequent assumption that the world comes pre-parsed into discrete entities that words are simply pinned to. The reality of course is that the world is in itself unparsed and that parsing is part of what words do."

Ridiculous. A "simplistic view of language" resulted in that idea. Perhaps if you condensed your rambling a bit, you might get a better idea of what you could and should be thinking.

Apologies if my post seem to ramble. Perhaps my main point can be made clearer, and shown not the be ridiculous...

In response to the scientific claim that the self is illusory, i.e. not what it seems to be, we can ask: well how does it *seem* to be such that it's not really that way; i.e., what properties does it seem to have such that it does not actually have them?

For illustration, let's say the scientist says that the self seems to be a *unity*, but in fact is not: in looking into the way the brain produces the sense of self, we see that the sense of self is created by a variety of different processes and so is not really a unity. (Dubious reasoning should already be evident)

Now the idea here on the part of the scientist is that that which is referred to by 'the self' it not a unity though it ordinarily seems to be. An assumption here - and this is where the simplistic view of language comes in - is that there is a distinct phenomenon - the self - that exists prior to language and is such that discoveries about it should affect what we ordinarily mean by, or conceive as, 'the self'; i.e. the self is like the moon: independent of language and such that what science discovers about it should affect how we ordinarily talk about it.

This picture is based in a false view of the relation between language and phenomena like the self. The self less like the moon -i.e. something with "natural" boundaries - than the state of Utah - i.e. something with human-made boundaries. As soon a scientist begins talking about the self as something that e.g., is made up of brain processes, the scientist begins moving the boundaries of "the self" away from what they are in ordinary language. We might say the scientist turns the self from Utah into Nevada. On the basis of the assumption that the self has a "true" shape, as the moon does, the scientist says that Nevada is the self's true shape and that our ordinary sense that the self is shaped like Utah is an illusion.

But "the self," being unlike the moon, can have the shape of both Nevada and Utah so long as we're clear that we're using the expression 'the self' in different senses. Given this, it's a mistake (one based on a simplistic view of language) to say that the self as ordinarily conceived or experienced is illusory. While if the moon seemed square we could be corrected by science that it is in fact round, if the self ordinarily seems a unity, the claim that it isn't means moving to a different conception of self. When it comes to understanding our own minds the line between seeming and being is hazy if not non-existent.

So Baron, if something seems wrong in this, politely explain. I'm aware I could be wrong, which is part of why I post it.

OK, but what I disagreed with first is that the world, to you, does not come pre-parsed into discrete entities that words are simply pinned to. To me that's backwards, as it's fairly clear that the world comes with discrete systems with different purposes, often in conflict with each other while in the end forced to evolve cooperatively. Yes we pin words to these systems to define them, thinking that with those definitions we can understand them, and to an extent, by that process, we can begin to. Parsing then is not what words do to the world, but what we do to understand what the world does to us.

As to the self, each living thing is a separately motivated entity from every other, and each of those entities has what some have come to call an executive self that the other parts of that "thing" can't operate without. And each of these things has a myriad of functional systems that operate in expectant cooperation with each other, but yet make their choices with some independence - and they might see "themselves" as selfs as well. (And each bacterium that we need to help us, as independent selves, survive will also see itself as a more or less cooperative self.) And each self operates with a functional intelligence that serves separate purposes and is able to learn separate strategies to serve them, oddly enough.(All of this is in my informed opinion of course.)Now I'm basically a long time student of behaviors rather than of the hard sciences, but I don't think science sees the self as illusory in the sense that you've ascribed to them. You're trying hard of course to make a philosophical point, but I don't think you've made it by that shape analogy. The individual or individualized self is not a shape but a set of systems that have had reasons to differentiate their shape. Systems acquire purposes, and shapes may "acquire" accidents, but don't acquire anything for any purpose without those systems.Massimo hates it when I speak of purposes, but I hate it when he and others don't. And I may be wrong but I don't see you including purposes in your philosophy either. You can substitute "reasons" for purposes, but that's actually a backward and after the fact way of looking at how systems work. And in the end it prevents you and the scientists as well from understanding "why" they work.Now I haven't said much about our facility for being deceived and self deceived by illusions. And a round moon may be more unround than we can discern, but few of us will see it square. Squareness just doesn't seem suitable to its purposes.

OK, but what I disagreed with first is that the world, to you, does not come pre-parsed into discrete entities that words are simply pinned to. To me that's backwards, as it's fairly clear that the world comes with discrete systems with different purposes, often in conflict with each other while in the end forced to evolve cooperatively. Yes we pin words to these systems to define them, thinking that with those definitions we can understand them, and to an extent, by that process, we can begin to. Parsing then is not what words do to the world, but what we do to understand what the world does to us.

As to the self, each living thing is a separately motivated entity from every other, and each of those entities has what some have come to call an executive self that the other parts of that "thing" can't operate without. And each of these things has a myriad of functional systems that operate in expectant cooperation with each other, but yet make their choices with some independence - and they might see "themselves" as selfs as well. (And each bacterium that we need to help us, as independent selves, survive will also see itself as a more or less cooperative self.) And each self operates with a functional intelligence that serves separate purposes and is able to learn separate strategies to serve them, oddly enough.(All of this is in my informed opinion of course.)Now I'm basically a long time student of behaviors rather than of the hard sciences, but I don't think science sees the self as illusory in the sense that you've ascribed to them. You're trying hard of course to make a philosophical point, but I don't think you've made it by that shape analogy. The self is not a shape but a set of systems that have had reasons to differentiate their shape. Systems acquire purposes, and shapes may "acquire" accidents, but don't acquire anything for any purpose without those systems.Massimo hates it when I speak of purposes, but I hate it when he and others don't. And I may be wrong but I don't see you including purposes in your philosophy either. You can substitute "reasons" for purposes, but that's actually a backward and after the fact way of looking at how systems work. And in the end it prevents you and the scientists as well from understanding "why" they work.Now I haven't said much about our facility for being deceived and self deceived by illusions. And a round moon may be more unround than we can discern, but few of us will see it square. Squareness just doesn't seem suitable to its purposes.

The responsive silence compels me to add this: The fact as I see it is that life forms make proactive choices that cause things to happen. And these causative strategies would have to have been around before their operational forms developed. Someone wrote that “strategy is the function of intelligence." But the form alone has no intelligence. It can't choose, even though it's a cause of choice. The function chooses form and/or chooses how it will be caused to adapt.

That doesn’t mean that forms don’t offer limits to the nature of any strategies that find them useful. Or that strategies aren’t restricted to the limits of our natural geometry, our fractals, our buckyballs, and the like. But there is clearly an intelligent aspect to the versatility and strengths of these archetypical forms, whether the product of some universal trial and error experimentation or not.

As Massimo knows, I reject most modern ideas of free will in Western philosophy, in part because I agree w/Dennett et al on the nature of the "self," while saying that, re free will, Dennett doesn't take it far enough, unlike, say, a Daniel Wegner.

And, per Doug Hofstadter, I say "mu" to most of those traditional discussions and ideas. Beyond the reasons above, most such discussions treat "free will" vs "determinism" as the only two options, as an either-or polarity instead of a continuum, and more: http://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2012/01/mu-to-free-will.html

"So, think for a moment about the creation of the United States of America. After the Revolution, the American colonies were a collection of fiercely independent and mostly autonomous states, each with its own distinctive character. In 1787, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay set out to convince these states to come together in a federation that would ensure a durable government for posterity. Eventually, this new entity would evolve a shared national identity out of the idiosyncrasies of these separate states; it became a functioning unit in its own right."

Is it actually true that each of the original post-colonial entities were "fiercely independent". As opposed to entities that were prepared to trade their fierce independence for the protection of a national armed force? Why should we accept that this is a concept true for then, let alone now?